Deacons for Defense provided protection when no one else would

Robert Hicks, vice president of the Bogalusa Voters League, second from left, and other demonstrators shout the Black Power chant as they pass white onlookers upon arrival at Franklinton, Louisiana on July 11, 1966, concluding a two-day march from Bogalusa.(Photo: Jack Thornell, AP)

Corrections & Clarifications: A previous version of this story should have attributed background information about the Deacons for Defense to BlackPast.org.

BOGALUSA, La. -- The home of the late civil rights activist Robert Hicks received a state historic marker in 2014 and was recognized on the National Register of Historic places in 2015. Now, his family is working to transform the home into a civil rights museum.

Hicks was a leader of the Deacons for Defense and Justice in the 1960s, a grassroots self-defense force that protected civil rights workers and African-Americans trying to register to vote — and that got put under FBI surveillance because of it.

Barbara Hicks-Collins, the activist’s daughter, says the journey to making her father’s home a museum started with getting a street named for her father four months after his death in 2010. Then came the state historic marker and the National Register.

“We’re one step closer to completely honoring my father,” she says. “This is just another accomplishment along the way.”

Hicks-Collins says the process has suffered minor setbacks recently because the home has been repeatedly vandalized. The family planned to have the home re-wired and security cameras installed. A contractor also told her that the home’s foundation and roof needed work before the project could move forward.

In the meantime, the family’s civil rights work will be featured in an exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. The museum is scheduled to open in September.

“My dad’s work has been inspiring,” says Charles Hicks, who now lives in Washington. “My dad was willing to stand up for what he believed in. ... To see how much people honored and valued him makes me feel good. He had characteristics that people admired.”

According to the online African-American encyclopedia BlackPast.org, a group of men from Jonesboro, La., led by Earnest “Chilly Willy” Thomas and Frederick Douglas Kirkpatrick, founded the Deacons in July 1964. The group was organized to protect members of the Congress of Racial Equality from Ku Klux Klan violence.

Robert Hicks, Charles Sims and A.Z. Young started the first affiliate chapter in Bogalusa. The group’s intense confrontations with the Klan in Bogalusa was pivotal in forcing the federal government’s involvement on the behalf of the local African-American community.

The Deacons were one of the first visible self-defense forces in the South and represented a new, more assertive face of the civil rights movement, BlackPast.org notes. The group was successful in providing protection for blacks registering to vote and for white and black civil rights workers operating in the area.

According to Tulane University professor Lance Hill’s book The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement, the group grew to several hundred members and 21 chapters in the Deep South.

According to BlackPast.org, the Deacons’ strategy and methods attracted the attention the FBI, which launched an investigation into the group’s activities that ultimately lasted several years. After the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965, the FBI turned its attention to other groups, such as the Black Panther Party. The Deacons as a group were defunct by 1968.

Hicks-Collins and her brother recall atypical childhoods, with teen years filled with memories of the civil rights movement.

“We gave up our entire life,” Hicks-Collins says. “The sacrifice that people made is a part of our history, and that needs to be preserved.”

“Those were scary times,” Charles Hicks says. “We were a marked family. We couldn’t just go outside and play. We made a lot of sacrifices, not only for us, but for everyone in Bogalusa.”

Hicks-Collins says the city of Bogalusa issued her family an official apology in 2015 at an event at the city’s Cassidy Park. The location was particularly poignant.

Robert Hicks was leading an integration effort at that once-segregated park in May 1965 when white men attacked women and children with clubs, belts and sticks. The injured activists had to be taken to New Orleans 75 miles away for medical treatment because they could not receive treatment in Bogalusa.

“I thought it was ironic that the place we held the event was the same place that symbolized a battleground during that time period,” Hicks-Collins says. “It was quite emotional.”